The usage of home network technologies can vary significantly between and within customer premises. This variation can cause difficulties for a service provider trying to troubleshoot faults or determine the available connectivity. If a customer reports that his IPTV service is not working properly for example, then it is useful to know what type of network is being used from the gateway or router to the set-top box and its performance, in case the problem is related to an issue in the home network. However, a DSL service provider does not usually have any visibility of the home network performance beyond the gateway or router.
This problem is further complicated by the ever increasing number of network connectivity technologies that a customer might use, including Ethernet, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, 5 GHz Wi-Fi, Powerline networking, and hybrid devices that incorporate several of these technologies in the same unit. Performance, and in particular throughput, of each of these technologies can vary significantly (over time) as well, making attempts to identify the technology based on throughput alone difficult.
Simply measuring the bandwidth or throughput of the link is not helpful. FIG. 1 shows the exemplary bandwidth performance of a 5 GHz Wi-Fi link to an IPTV terminal over a 24 hour period. As can be seen, the bandwidth fluctuates dramatically over the course of the period, and thus cannot be used to accurately identify the technology being used.
“A Passive Technique for Fingerprinting Wireless Devices with Wired-side Observations” by Selcuk Uluagac et al., IEEE Conference 2013 on Communications and Network Security, 14-16 Oct. 2013, describes the use of statistical techniques to create unique, reproducible device and device type signatures that represent time varying behaviour in network traffic. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used to classify devices and device types.
“Fingerprinting Internet Paths using Packet Pair Dispersion” by Rishi Sinha et al, USC Computer Science Technical Report No. 06-876, describes an approach to Internet path fingerprinting based on the distribution of end-to-end packet-pair measurements. Path fingerprinting is a component of applications that distinguish among different network paths, including path selection in overlay networks, multipath routing and monitoring and diagnosis of network problems.
“Classification of access network types: Ethernet, wireless LAN, ADSL, cable modem or dialup?”, by Wei W et al, Computer Networks Vol 52, no 17, 8 Dec. 2008, pages 3205-3217 describes a scheme to classify access networks into three categories: Ethernet, wireless LAN and low-bandwidth connection. The scheme is based on intrinsic characteristics of the various access networks, and utilizes the median and entropy of a packet-pair inter arrival times.
“And End-to-End Technique to Estimate the Transmission Rate of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN” by Rocha A A et al, Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Communications, pages 415-42, XP031125708, describes an active measurement technique to infer the bit rate of an IEEE802.11 device. The proposed method is based both on a recently proposed technique to infer the type of access network and on the packet pair approach, but adapted to take into account the overhead caused by the IEEE802.11 control and the existence of concurrent WLAN traffic.
European patent EP1662705 describes a method and apparatus for estimating the available bandwidth on a packet network. By approximating a packet network, such as the internet, by an M/M/1 queuing model, the available bandwidth of the network can be determined from the variance of the distribution of the sojourn times of packets transmitted through the network.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,437,264 describes measuring the speed of a link. An initial packet train having an initial length over the link is sent. A speed result is determined based at least in part on an actual time of reception of individual packets in the packet train. The quality of the speed result for the initial packet train is evaluated according to a constraint. A determination is made as to whether to send a subsequent packet train based at least in part on the quality of the speed result.